NONSENSE

"Yes, I would like some scrambled eggs, but where would you reappear? "

Non-sense is common in the language of the dying.

I do not use the term "nonsense" perjoratively. Nonsense is language that does not make sense to us based on our understanding at the time. Chinese is non-sense to us if we do not speak it well; however, if we learn Chinese, what first appeared as unintelligible becomes comprehensible. In the same way, had someone talked about ATMS or IPhones fifty years ago, these words would have been complete nonsense to us!

Often times, ideas and concepts that are at the cutting edge at first appear nonsensical. As a matter of fact, a survey of many of the greatest discoveries in science is also a survey of concepts that were described at one time as complete nonsense. What looks like nonsense at any given point is often a harbinger of new frontiers.

In our research so far, it does, indeed, seem that certain kinds of nonsense appear at end of life but other kinds do not. The question we are asking, of course, is why do we see the specific kinds of constructions we do at the time of death and not see others.

Raymond Moody has discovered through his informal research that different kinds of nonsense have different kinds of cognitive effects . We see that over the centuries and the world, nonsense has represented a tool for altering consciousness. Zen koans, such as "What is the sound of one hand clapping" offer nonsensical phrases that aim to shift the consciousness of the practitioner. Shaman songs, incantations, spells, speaking in tongues and nonsensical hypnotic inductions have all been associated with shifts in consciousness.

We may not fully understand the function of nonsense at end of life, but the following are some of the patterns that are emerging:

Linguistic nonsenserefers to phrases and sentences that, in isolation, don’t make sense to us. They have word combinations that are unintelligible. Some examples:

--“Tell Jack my modality is broken.” (Modalities don’t break.) --“Introductory offer: store is closing for foods and goods run by the university.” (The terms introductory offer and closing for foods and goods are contra- dictory — and a university does not usually offer foods and goods.) --“There is so much so in sorrow.” (So is not a noun. How can there be so much of it in sorrow?) --“Water is most reliable.” (Water generally is not asso- ciated with reliability, and it is not clear what the superlative most refers to.)

Interestingly, all the linguistic nonsense in our informal sample is grammatically and syntactically correct. This is called categorical nonsense. The sentences exhibit the correct grammar and syntax: the nouns are where they are supposed to be, the verbs are where they are supposed to be, but the categories do not fit together. For example, in the sentence “Tell Jack my modality is broken,” the sentence sounds like English and all the parts are correctly placed. However, since modalities don’t break, the sentence is a violation of what we know about the category “things that break.” A “modality” is not among them.

In contrast, sentences that constitute situational nonsense make sense to us. The categories do fit together. For example, when my father said, “I am bringing the boxes to the art show,” the sentence was perfectly intelligible. But the sentence was nonsensical in context: he had no boxes in hand, and he had been walking down a busy street at midnight in his underwear. When a person who is dying refers to guests at that dinner but the living do not see them, this is situational nonsense be-cause although the because the sentences were intelligible but the sentences sound like nonsense given the context.

Here are some typical examples of situational nonsense:

Prepositional Nonsense: Speaking of movement and one's place in space in unusual ways

--"I want to pull those down to earth somehow…I don’t really know…"no more earth binding…--"Help me down the rabbit hole…"--'Hurry up, get me down…please…it’s the end…"--"I’ve got to get down to earth. Help me. No. Wait a minute. You are one stop from real hope which means…one stop from real hope…I am living between two places…Would like to make my place mark the other place…Remarkable."

Hybrid Nonsense: One part grounded in what is perceptible, another part isn’t.

--"Get me my checkbook since I have to pay at the gate."--"I need my pearls for the dance tonight."--"Help me down the rabbit hole. Please massage my feet so I can get down into the rabbit hole."--"Get my camera. I need to take a picture of this."--"They left the ladders, but the ladders are too short to go up there."--"Where are my glasses and computer? I have to get to work."

Unseen Visitors and Landscapes: The dying speak of things unseen by the living--“There is a young woman standing at the foot of my bed.” (Stated when there was no one in the room besides his daughter, who transcribed these words.) --“Mom! Mom is here with me now.” (The speaker’s mother had died years earlier.) --“It is so beautiful! It is so beautiful here!” (Stated while the speaker lay in an unattractive hospital room.) --“Can you hear those bells ringing?” (No bells were ringing.) --“I am in the green dimension.” (Dimensions are not green.) --“The white butterflies coming out of your mouth are so beautiful.” (Butterflies do not come out of mouths.)

These sentences are linguistically meaningful but do not make sense in the context in which they are spoken.

Making Sense of the Unintelligible

I have discovered that people react to nonsense in very different ways. For some, the emergence of nonsense threatens their sense of stability and safety — as does witnessing the death of someone they love. Loss, for most of us, is painfully unintelligible. However, from my interviews I’ve learned that many family members are able to move past the nonsense and find ways to connect, either by entering their loved one’s new world or by simply nodding their heads kindly in love and agreement even though they may not understand anything that is said.

I asked Lesly, who was worried about her mother hallucinating guests at the dinner table, if she could enter into her mother’s world and engage her in conversation. I suggested, for example, that she say, “Tell me all about the guests, Mom. I want to make sure I know who is here!” My friend started to cry. “I miss the conversations we used to have.” A couple of weeks later she said, “I had been so focused on the loss of connection with her that I had not imagined we could connect again.” Stephen Jones reflects, “When the dying speak, they need us to hear as well as feel. Simply dismissing their words as confused gibberish places too much responsibility on the speaker.”

Situational nonsense offers opportunities to listen with our hearts and maintain our precious connections with people we love. The following example of situational nonsense from chaplain Cari Willis is a good example of how it offers opportunities to build bridges at the threshold with those we love:

Years ago, I was able to spend the last several months of the life of my girlfriend Yukiko with her. The days and moments that I spent with her were filled with love, laughter, and wonder. But on one particular day as I was sitting quietly with one of Yukiko’s very good friends, Yukiko sat up and told us: “Turn down that radio! I hate that music!”

Her friend looked at me quite troubled, because the room, so quiet and peace-filled, seemed to us almost like sacred space.

However, I went along with Yukiko and piped up and said, “Do you see the radio?”

After a few minutes went by, Yukiko said, “Yes.”

“Well, see if you can find the knob to change the chan-nel. You may have to turn it a time or two before you find something you like.”

Several minutes went by. The room was eerily silent now — we dared not speak or break the silence in any way, shape, or form. Finally we heard from Yukiko a loud “Ooooooooohhh, that is so much better. It worked. I changed the channel. Thank you!”

Yukiko’s other friend and I both broke out in laughter. We learned that day that, while we could not hear the music in the room, to my dying friend music was playing, and playing loudly — just like she wanted it.

The radio in this example of situational nonsense illustrates, in part, how I think of the nonsense of the threshold. It is like the static we find between radio stations: nonsense may be what we hear as we are tuning in to a different station. Since we, the living, do not hear this station, the words from our loved ones sometimes sound like gibberish.

The Unseen

Sometimes the nonsense we hear sounds clearly like gibberish and is hard to understand but other times, the words are clear but we are not clear to what or whom they are referring.

The dying commonly identify a loved one, usually a family member, as having come to bring them “home” or take them somewhere.

This example from Donna is typical: “It was as if my dad were speaking to my mom — who had died ten years earlier — by phone, and I heard only his end of the telephone call. He was so ex- cited and happy. It was hard to believe that it was just imagination. Something very real seemed to be going on.”

The reunions are often joyous. They not only offer comfort to those who are dying but also can reassure those who are nearby and who understand what is going on and are not afraid. While these “take-away figures” remain unseen by us, they are often vivid to those who do see them. “Don’t you see him there? There he is!” one sixty-eight-year-old mother exclaimed to her daughter, pointing to the younger woman’s father, who had died ten years earlier. “Here’s Mom, I have to go now” was a phrase I heard from several people. The following are some other examples I recorded:

“I was in the other room, and I heard my mother talking and talking. I came to her and asked who she was speaking to. ‘I am talking to your father!’ she said. My dad had died eight years earlier. She seemed so happy. ‘I feel so much more calm now,’ she explained, ‘much better now.’ ”

“My mom was speaking to my stepdad, who had died a few years earlier. She was telling me how much better she felt when she saw him.”

“I had a family member who went into cardiac arrest. She survived for a time afterward. She talked about how she saw her dad, our grandmother, and aunts, and how they were all standing there, waiting on her. She said that she recalled telling them she was not ready, but that she told them she missed them and loved them.”

Dorothy explained to me that her sixty-six-year-old husband, a Vietnam veteran, died after a long struggle with the dilatation effects of Agent Orange. At his final dinner, he asked her about the woman who had been there all day. She replied that they had been alone. Because he was heavily medicated, he had often had vivid dreams, and Dorothy simply thought this was another one. He per- sisted, saying that she had been there for a long time, that she was someone he knew well, but he couldn’t remember her name. (He was terrible with names.) He got up from the table, took his plate to the kitchen, kissed Dorothy (not something he did normally after a meal), and went to her room for a nap from which he never awoke. She told me, “I wish now that I had asked him questions instead of dismissing it. It comforts me to think that someone he loved very much came to take him home.”

If you hear a loved one begin to speak of or with a deceased friend or family member, you can ask questions and lean into that moment fully, for it may be a signal that death is near, as in the following example. “It began with my mother telling me about a young girl dying, who, on her deathbed, had seen visions of angels and relatives who had passed. For a moment the girl talked to them, and then she told the people at her bedside not to worry about her, that she would have to go now. And then she passed.”

One public account of a predeath vision followed comedian Sam Kinison’s death in a head-on collision in 1992. Carl LaBove, Kinison’s best friend, was traveling in a van behind him when the accident occurred. The story was published in several places, in- cluding the New York Times. This report comes from Paul Luvera:

At first it looked like there were no serious injuries to Kinison, but within minutes he suddenly said to no one in particular: “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die.” LaBove later said [that] “it was as if he was having a conversation, talking to some unseen somebody else,” some unseen per- son. “Then there was a pause as if Kinison was listening to the other person speak. Then he asked, “But why?” and after another pause LaBove heard him clearly say: “Okay, Okay, Okay.” LaBove said: “The last ‘Okay’ was so soft and at peace...Whatever voice was talking to him gave him the right answer and he just relaxed with it. He said it so sweet, like he was talking to someone he loved.

Could It Be the Medications?

Of all end-of-life communications, deathbed visions have been the most widely studied over the centuries by a range of researchers. Stories about final words to deceased loved ones and figures of all kinds, along with descriptions of beautiful landscapes or architecture, appear across decades. Hundreds of stories have been documented and shared about this form of nonreferential commu- nication, and yet, surprisingly, as a culture we are just now beginning to acknowledge and recognize these visions and the words that describe them as a part of the realm that people perceive as they die.

There is a world that the dying seem to enter that is sometimes shared with us briefly. A 2014 research study at the Center for Hospice and Palliative Care demonstrated that end-of-life dreams and visions (ELDVs) are common. Eighty-seven percent of the study’s participants reported dreams or visions; 72 percent of those entailed reunions with deceased loved ones, while 52 percent of the visions were related to themes of preparing to go somewhere. The visions appeared months, weeks, days, or hours before death and typically lessened the fear of dying among those experiencing them, making their transition from life to death easier. While it is common for people to experience discomfort, fear, anxiety, and agitation be- fore dying, “a person’s fear of death often diminishes as a direct result of ELDVs, and what arises is new insight into mortality.... ELDVs do not deny death, but in fact, [they] transcend the dying experience.”

This knowledge is becoming commonly accepted in the medical field, as illustrated by this entry about dying that appears on the mainstream online resource WebMD: “Hallucinations and visions, especially of long-gone loved ones, can be comforting. If seeing and talking to someone who isn’t there makes the person who’s dying happier, you don’t need to try to convince them that they aren’t real. It may upset them and make them argue and fight with you.”

Health-care professionals tell me that deathbed visions are qualitatively different from hallucinations that result from medications. Hallucinations include images of animals, insects on the walls, dragons, figures such as devils, and visions of people who are critical of the dying but unknown to them. Most hallucinations are described as annoying, sometimes frightening, and easily managed by medication changes.

Hallucinations are more likely to be forgotten by the patient, and they occur when the patient is not lucid. Visions, unlike hallucinations or delirium, typically occur in patients who are aware of their environment and are lucid — and these patients often remember their visions clearly. Palliative-care nurse and researcher Madelaine Lawrence explained to me during our interview that when patients have deathbed visions, they are able to “move between worlds lucidly and easily — and this capacity does not exist when a patient is heavily influenced by drug-induced hallucinations.”

The person appears to be aware of both the world we know and the one that is unseen to us. Researchers have determined that the dying speak to the figures in their visions in complete sentences, while this does not happen frequently when people have hallucinations. My transcripts and accounts confirm this find- ing. Many beloveds reported hearing loved ones having complex conversations with deceased friends and relatives. ​

Is it nonsense we hear at the threshold, or a new sense?

Bran scan research reveals that the very regions of the brain that are activated during deeply meditative and spiritual states may relate to those very areas associated with nonsense. What might be the relationship between the nonsense we hear and the survival of consciousness? Check out the discussion about consciousness to find out more.